If you ask me to name the most overlooked opportunity in lead generation, I won’t hesitate to answer: “Optimizing landing pages for conversions.”
It sounds so obtrusive, doesn’t it? “Optimization.” Like I’m asking you to whip out your lightsaber and mysteriously coerce a web page into mystical perfection. In fact, it doesn’t have to take a lot of time and energy to make a good page even better.
The secret to landing page optimization is this: You don't have to be perfect to improve. You just have to do one thing a little better to optimize for conversions. All you really need are a few minutes a day.
Here’s a short story that illustrates this point really well: At Formstack, we spend a lot of time tweaking our landing pages. (We even have a landing page for the perfect landing page.) Guess what we learned from a recent A/B test? We were wrong!
We’ve been preaching shorter web forms for years. But when we added more fields to our own demo request form, submissions didn’t go down. The form generated just as many leads. Only now, we’re also getting more data to qualify them. Without that 10-minute test, we never would have known to go with a longer web form. You can do the same thing. Here are three ways you can easily optimize your landing pages in just 45 minutes:
#1: Optimize Your Content (20 minutes)
Which keywords are generating the most leads? Every landing page you publish is another page to be indexed by search engines. May as well make it count! You can do this by optimizing your landing pages with the keywords people are already using to find your products and services. Here’s an easy and effective method that should take about 20 minutes from start to finish:
- Visit your dashboard in the Google Search Console and click on Search Analytics > Queries.
- Jot down the top three terms that relate directly to your landing page content. Look for high-intent keywords that signal someone is ready to buy, download, or otherwise fill out your landing page form.
- Pull up your landing page editor and sprinkle in these top keywords where they fit naturally: in the title tag, meta description, header tags (h2s, h3s), and maybe once or twice in the copy itself
#2: Optimize Your Form (15 minutes)
This is one of the most important—but overlooked—components of landing page optimization. The easier it is for people to complete your form, the faster they’ll get into your resource or product. All you have to do is spend a little time adjusting behind-the scenes settings. These two should take you less than five minutes each:
Identify and remove bottlenecks.
If one question is causing visitors to abandon your form, simply remove or adjust it. Problem solved!
Turn on and review Partial Submissions.
Learn more about your target market by viewing form information that was never submitted! This feature also gives you further insight into fields that might be halting conversions. If you aren't capturing the right information or people are consistently leaving one field blank, consider making some revisions.
#3: Set Up an A/B Test (10 minutes)
With A/B testing, decisions are so much easier, and less is always more. It takes less than a second to know which version of the web form to keep, right? And with A/B testing, less is always more. You have to test only one thing at a time. Otherwise, you’ll never know what’s working.
Tweak one element—a headline, a testimonial, a color, a call to action—and launch your test. Then see what the data says and make the higher-performing version permanent. It shouldn’t take more than ten minutes to set up and analyze each test.
Start optimizing your landing pages now!
The more you can optimize your landing pages, the more leads you’ll squeeze out of every campaign. The key is breaking it out into manageable chunks. Or, you know, getting out the lightsabers if you want to maintain the facade of mysteriousness. Your secret will be safe with us.
Looking for more ideas? Click the link below to learn landing page optimization secrets and see actual A/B test examples you can copy.
